Beppe Fenech Adami hits out at Cabinet costs

The Nationalist Party’s deputy leader for party affairs Beppe Fenech Adami has claimed that the Labour cabinet had cost the taxpayer €20.1 million during 2013 and 2014, an increase of €8.5 million over the previous Nationalist administration.

In March 2013, Joseph Muscat appointed a Cabinet of 14 ministers and eight parliamentary secretaries, unprecedented in size when compared to Lawrence Gonzi’s 14 ministries, including the OPM.

Fenech Adami claimed that the increase in costs for the Cabinet could have been spent “on employing 440 teachers and 530 nurses”, when instead it was “only catering for the Labour core.”

“In five years’ time, the government would have spent a total of €100 million on its Cabinet – an increase of approximately €42 million when compared with the PN’s costs,” Fenech Adami said.

PN executive committee president Marthese Portelli said the costings were “not based on historical accounting information”, but on official data provided in PQs, budget estimates and guidelines published by the OPM.

The PN said that Cabinet costs under the former PN administration totalled €11,605,294 while the Labour Cabinet was costing €20,118,604. In five years’ time, this would total €100,593,020, an increase of €42,566,500 over the PN’s costs, Fenech Adami claimed.

A similar exercise carried out by MaltaToday in November 2013, based on the Budget 2014 ministerial line-item estimates set the cost of ministerial and private secretariat salaries, bonuses, allowances and overtime at €11.8 million for the year – 46% more than Gonzi’s €8.1 million in 2013.

Fenech Adami, flanked by MEP candidates Kevin Plumpton and Norman Vella, lambasted the government for “wasting public funds on the Cabinet” instead of fulfilling a promise to “spend taxpayers’ money diligently”.

“Costs for ministries increased not only because Muscat has the biggest ever Cabinet in history, but due to the large secretariats and the employment of various consultants,” Fenech Adami said, having added political consultants employed as persons of trust by the ministers. “Over two-thirds of the members of the secretariats were employed from outside the civil service,” Fenech Adami said.

Fenech Adami conceded that the figures did not include the €500 weekly salary increase awarded to ministers and MPs in 2008, which had been refunded since 2012 and not included in Muscat’s new cabinet salaries.

In a reaction, the Labour Party accused the Opposition’s former cabinet of pocketing the €500 weekly salary increase while having raised utility tariffs. “That cabinet dished out €1 million in consultancies, most of them by direct order, and left Enemalta debt-ridden.”

In an off-kilter question from the Labour stable, Fenech Adami dismissed claims that he was interested in PN leader Simon Busuttil’s post.

Fenech Adami, whose father Eddie led the party from 1979 till his resignation in 2003, said he was “definitely not” gunning for the party leadership and that he was “confident in Simon Busuttil”.

“All the PN’s members and officials are backing Simon Busuttil in the upcoming election,” Fenech Adami said, as Busuttil faces his first important electoral test in the forthcoming European Parliament elections.